Saturday, July 22, 2017

Via Instapundit: Dennis Rodman will be disappointed to learn that the US is set to ban all citizens from traveling to North Korea, according to two agencies that operate tours there. Koryo Tours and Young Pioneer Tours said the ban would be announced on 27 July to come into effect 30 days later, the BBC reported. "After the 30-day grace period any US national that travels to North Korea will have their passport invalidated by their government." The ban comes one month after US student Otto Warmbier died following his imprisonment by the Kim regime.

China-based Young Pioneer Tours, which had taken Warmbier to North Korea, and Koryo Tours said the ban will come into force on July 27 - the anniversary of the end of the Korean War - with a 30-day grace period. Koryo Tours added that the Swedish embassy in Pyongyang, which handles consular affairs for the United States in the North, informed it of the ban, but did not say how long it would last. The U.S. embassy in the South Korean capital, Seoul, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Rowan Beard said that the 30-day grace period would "give leeway for any [Americans] currently in the country as tourists or on humanitarian work". Simon Cockerill, of Koryo Tours, said: "It remains to be seen what the exact text is, but the indication is it's just a straight up ban on Americans going." Mr Cockerill told the BBC the agency would still conduct tours and take Americans until the ban came into effect.

Gabriel Cornejo, 45, took a DNA test proving a child his ex-girlfriend had 16 years ago was not his.

The test was too late. In 2003, a child support court in Houston ruled that Cornejo owed his ex-girlfriend child support because, she claims, there was no way he wasn't the father.

At the crux of why Cornejo must pay up is Texas' family code, chapter 161, which states, even if you're not the biological father, you still owe child support that accrued before the DNA test proves you're not the father, Cornejo's lawyer Cheryl Coleman told Chron.com.

"I've researched the records and found that there is an issue with the service where they served him back in 2002," Coleman said. "There are some anomalies with how this case handled by the attorney general's office. He was never served with those documents in 2002 when the actual paternity petition was filed against him."

“We were about to head back to base when we saw smoke coming from down the street, so we decided to investigate,” explained Sgt. Matthew Odom, of Norman, Oklahoma, a Soldier assigned to Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 279th Infantry Regiment, 45th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, also known as the “Thunderbirds.”

The smoke was coming from an apartment building that had caught fire.

Odom, along with fellow Thunderbirds Sgt. Nelson Deese, Spc. Vincent Humerickhouse, Spc. Kellar Jackson, Spc. Aaron Moore and Pfc. Kevin Polk, rushed into the burning building and evacuated the third floor before local firefighters arrived on scene.

“We kept asking if there was anyone still in the building, and finally we found someone who spoke English who said that there was,” Odom said. “Sgt. Deese and I just gave each other a look; it was like we knew what the other was thinking and we just stormed in.”

“Instinctively, we all just ran inside and started getting people out,” said Jackson, a native of Watonga, Oklahoma. “There was a lot of smoke. It was chaotic and intense.”

The language barrier made the situation even more difficult, Jackson said.

Jamel Dunn, 32, drowned in a retention pond July 9 as the teens recorded his ordeal and did not bother to help him, or call for help in Cocoa, Florida. Dunn’s body was not discovered until three days, according to Florida Today, a part of the USA Today network.

The video that police called "disturbing" surfaced online after his body was discovered, and showed him in his final moments.

"He started to struggle and scream for help and they just laughed. They didn’t call the police. They just laughed the whole time. He was just screaming ... for someone to help him," Yvonne Martinez, spokesman for the Cocoa Police Department said.

Friday, July 21, 2017

Eric Ziegler, 38, didn't do a good enough job teaching his son Christopher to wash his hands after going to the bathroom. So the State of Oregon put the boy in foster care.

That's not the only reason the government intervened. But a lengthy story by Samantha Swindler in The Oregonian doesn't shy away from the awful, outrage-inducing truth: The state has taken a couple's children away not because they're abusing or neglecting the kids but because it thinks the parents aren't smart enough to raise them properly.

Ziegler and his partner, Amy Fabbrini, both have below-average IQs—72 and 66, respectively—according to documents provided to The Oregonian. After Christopher was born in 2013, other family members (most significantly, Fabbrini's father, who has a troubled relationship with her) started warning the state's child welfare agency that there were problems.

It doesn’t take a whole lot of decency to conclude that this is a disgusting and tasteless display by an organization who’s White House correspondent (Jeff Mason) is the president of the White House Correspondents Association (WHCA). One has to wonder if Mason thinks this is good journalism.

As of 2:15 p.m. Eastern, there were zero signs of movement inside Spicer’s Virginia house. This being said, the debasing, paparazzi-like behavior by Reuters has actually given the American people a valuable takeaway, which is just now little the media take this seriously.

Ordered to pay $10 million to his wife of 40 years, the businessman disputed, ignored, chiseled and whittled virtually every court order and spousal payment over six years of his epic divorce battle. He just isn’t paying.

Last July, Justice Leonard Ricchetti sat in silence in his Brampton courtroom for a moment before sentencing Brian to six months in jail for ignoring his orders. “This is the only remedy that’s left,” Ricchetti finally said, sounding as dismayed as anyone by what was happening. As officers stepped in to arrest Brian, everyone waited for a last-second resolution.

“Everybody said this is just the way businessmen do business,” his former wife, Barbara Blatherwick, 64, recalled recently. “He’s going to wait until the last minute, he’s going to stand, he’s going to hear the jingling of the handcuffs and he’s going to pull a cheque out of his pocket. Nobody saw Brian going to jail. I was absolutely floored.”

A six-month jail term after stiffing his wife is only one remarkable part of Blatherwick v. Blatherwick.

Their high-stakes divorce has the salacious — a string of young girlfriends, duplicitous private eyes, a secret second family, staggering legal fees and offshore bank accounts. More striking still is the fraternity of enablers — a coterie of business partners — that banded together to shield a rich businessman’s money from his wife.

Via Instapundit: Ladies and gentlemen, I have an announcement to make: London is becoming a global laughing stock. Both intellectually and literally, Londoners are dying under the weight of a virulent dose of political correctness.

Last week, Transport for London pointlessly buckled to LGBT activists and banned the quintessentially British (and universally polite) phrase, “ladies and gentlemen” from its station announcements.

Its replacement – “good afternoon, everyone” – is deemed more “inclusive” and “gender neutral,” although even that might offend those with multiple personality disorders.

In a city that has recently undergone three terrorist attacks, this might seem like a curious use of resource for its Mayor, Sadiq Khan.

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

That’s the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Everybody knows the portion of it that forbids “self-incrimination” (actually, the language is broader than that “nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself”) But there’s also this part:

nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

In order by law to justly take someone’s life, deprive them of their liberty, or take their property, it must be with due process of law.
So why the bloody hell does “Civil Asset Forfeiture” even exist? This amounts to taking someone’s property simply because some individual in some position in government–whether a law enforcement officer or some bureaucrat–simply claims that they think the property might be used for, or come as a result of, criminal action.

They're all very good, how a key and lock work together, how Eskimo pies are produced, chains, zippers, pasta, a slinky falling is interesting, how a dog laps water, but one item I noticed on the third page is a GIF file but not animated and does convey the idea but not so perfectly shown.

They did say "perfectly."

They show a few things in nature, sunrise to sunset, flower blooming, insects doing things and the like, but they don't show a hummingbird's drinking. The bird actually shoves two tongues into flowers and uses the edges of the inside of flower's structure, whatever that might be (shown with a glass tube) to grab a portion of a droplet of nectar. I saw video clip on Reddit tonight. The closeup portion shows the two tongues ragged at their tips like split end hair. I showed this before but that video isn't so clear, not quite as good photography as this.

It's a very strange tongue, a strange construction. And a strange way to sip. And the action is unbelievably fast. Fifteen sips per second. Wikipedia says they flap their wings 50 times a second. The videos show the wings too and in a few it looks to me like the sips go faster than the wings. There are a bunch of videos now. They all take a slightly different approach in showing it. So it's not just me fascinated by this bird.

Thursday, July 20, 2017

"O.J. Simpson was granted parole Thursday after more than eight years in prison for a Las Vegas hotel heist, successfully making his case in a nationally televised hearing that reflected America's enduring fascination with the former football star."

Simpson, 70, could be a free man as early as Oct. 1. By then, he will have served the minimum of his nine-to-33-year armed-robbery sentence for a bungled attempt to snatch sports memorabilia and other mementos he claimed had been stolen from him.

He got the four votes he needed from the parole commissioners who heard his case. In agreeing to release him, they cited his lack of a prior conviction, the low risk he might commit another crime, his community support and his release plans.

During the more than hour-long hearing, Simpson forcefully insisted — as he has all along — that he was only trying to retrieve items that belonged to him and never meant to hurt anyone. He said he never pointed a gun at anyone nor made any threats during the crime. (Link to more)

The Newaygo County jury deliberated about eight hours before finding 49-year-old Glenna Duram guilty Wednesday of killing 46-year-old Martin Duram. He was shot five times in May 2015. Glenna Duram suffered a head wound in what prosecutors said was a suicide attempt, but survived.

Martin Duram’s ex-wife, Christina Keller, has said that after the slaying, the pet parrot, Bud, repeated “don’t (expletive) shoot” in Martin Duram’s voice. Keller took ownership of the bird after Martin Duram’s death.

Duram is due to be sentenced Aug. 28 on the murder and a felony firearm charge.

Via Drudge: The U.S. special counsel investigating possible ties between the Donald Trump campaign and Russia in last year’s election is examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses as well as those of his associates, according to a person familiar with the probe.

The president told the New York Times on Wednesday that any digging into matters beyond Russia would be out of bounds. Trump’s businesses have involved Russians for years, making the boundaries fuzzy so Special Counsel Robert Mueller appears to be taking a wide-angle approach to his two-month-old probe.

FBI investigators and others are looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a controversial SoHo development with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008, the person said.

Glioblastoma multiforme is a very aggressive tumor of astrocytes, star-shaped cells that are part of the glia. We used to think of glial cells as sort of the infrastructure of the brain, supporting and surrounding the neurons, but recently it's been discovered that astrocytes, in particular, have signaling functions of their own.

Astrocytes are tangled into the structures of the other glial cells. This image of an astrocyte gives an impression of how they are woven into the brain.

The office of Senator John McCain also released the following statement: “Senator McCain appreciates the outpouring of support he has received over the last few days. He is in good spirits as he continues to recover at home with his family in Arizona. He is grateful to the doctors and staff at Mayo Clinic for their outstanding care, and is confident that any future treatment will be effective. Further consultations with Senator McCain’s Mayo Clinic care team will indicate when he will return to the United States Senate.”(Why doesn't he resign? How long does he have to hold on to power. Why isn't there a mechanism to force a new election. Like the 25th amendment. I think there should be a constitutional amendment that if a senator or congressman misses a certain number of votes his seat will be declared open and a special election would be ordered.I know why he will not resign. He wants to stay on to start more wars and get more American boys killed overseas to nation build and do the bidding of the globalists. He will hold on bitterly and cost us many votes in the Senate. Maybe even cost a Supreme court nominee. Because of his ego and greed.)

WOODBURY, Conn. — Connecticut officials say the wife of longtime ESPN broadcaster Chris Berman died from blunt trauma and drowning after her car hit another vehicle in May.

The Hartford Courant reports that Dr. James Gill, the chief state medical examiner, has ruled 67-year-old Katherine Ann Berman’s death an accident.

Gill declined to release the toxicology results.

Police say the Cheshire woman’s vehicle struck the rear of a driver’s SUV and both veered off the road in Woodbury. Her car went down an embankment and overturned in a small body of water. The other driver, 87-year-old Edward Bertulis, was also killed. Police say he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt and was partially thrown from the vehicle.

But police in Alaska say that if they can’t touch sex workers at all, they have no chance of conducting successful undercover investigations. The problem with the bill, Alaska cops explain, is that their covers will be too easily blown by savvy sex workers who know what officers are and are not allowed to do, and employ a tactic called “cop checking” to sniff them out.

"(In an undercover investigation) they ask one simple question: 'Touch my breast.' OK, I'm out of the car. Done. And the case is over," Anchorage Police Department Deputy Chief Sean Case told the Alaska Dispatch News in a hypothetical example. "If we make that act (of touching) a misdemeanor, we have absolutely no way of getting involved in that type of arrest."

My Uncle Herman could never connect with Eddie. He would try to do father and son things with him all the time.

He would take him to the ball game and introduce him to Leo Durocher and Don Drysdale. Of course Eddie wasn't impressed because Sandy Koufax would come to our house all the time for sleepovers with Grandpa. He even slept with him in his coffin.. It was a tight fit but they climbed in head to feet. It must of been a tight fit because they made a lot of noise.

Uncle Herman would try to get Eddie interest in manly pursuits. He tried to teach him how to fix the car but Eddie didn't care. He only wanted to sneak around at night and peep into peoples windows. Or try to steal dirty underwear.

Former Breitbart Senior Editor MILO flew to New York specifically to take part in an extensive interview with NPR about his bestselling book, DANGEROUS. During the July 10 interview, which MILO has provided exclusive footage of, the host stated that the interview would be going live the next day. MILO was then reportedly contacted by an NPR producer that clarified that the interview would be published the following week.

When the interview was still not published, leading MILO to question why it had not gone live, he was reportedly informed that a short version of the interview would be published “sometime in August.”

When asked for comment, MILO said, “It’s perfectly obvious from the constantly shifting deadline from NPR producers and the line of questioning from the host that they were expecting a low-rent troll — someone who would assure the broadcaster’s ossified audience that anyone sympathetic to the President must be a redneck or an idiot.”

"By the time I got in a position to shoot, the hog was about 12 yards away," Wade said. "Cruiser was out of the my line to the hog so I fired."

It took three shots to take him down. The giant hog hit the ground near the carport. The next day, Wade took the wild hog to Brooks Peanut Company and weighed it on the drive-thru scales. The hog tipped the scales at 820 pounds and had six inch tushes.

According to the Alabama Dept. of Conservation and Natural Resources, feral hogs in Alabama pose a serious threat to native wildlife. High reproductive rates, a lack of natural predators, voracious omnivorous feeding habits, destructive rooting behavior and habitat destruction are just a few reasons why Alabama sportsmen and land managers are encouraged to help control this non-native species. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that feral hogs cause more than $800 million of agricultural damage in the United States annually.

Feral hogs are considered a game animal in Alabama and have no closed season and no bag limits. This means that on private land, hunters can legally hunt hogs every day of the year with no harvest restrictions.

"I didn't think twice about taking down this hog," Wade concluded. "I'd do it again tomorrow."

If you're like most Americans, you either aren't sure how to answer, or you're very sure—but very wrong. And it's not your fault. It's the fault, experts say, of decades of flawed or misleading nutrition advice—advice that was never based on solid science.

The US Department of Agriculture, along with the agency that is now called Health and Human Services, first released a set of national dietary guidelines back in 1980. That 20-page booklet trained its focus primarily on three health villains: fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol.

"The science that these guidelines were based on was wrong," Robert Lustig, a neuro-endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, told Tonic. In particular, the idea that cutting fat from a person's diet would offer some health benefit was never backed by hard evidence, Lustig said.

Just this week, some of Lustig's colleagues at UCSF released an incendiary report revealing that in the 1960s, sugar industry lobbyists funded research that linked heart disease to fat and cholesterol while downplaying evidence that sugar was the real killer.

Tuesday, July 18, 2017

Organizers aim to stop the shooting from Friday, Aug. 4, through Sunday, Aug. 6, with a unified and blunt message: “Nobody kill anybody.”

Their message has been printed on T-shirts and flyers. They designed a website and held community meetings. More than 1,600 people visited their Facebook page. The grass-roots campaign has swelled since it began in May.

“I’ve seen the momentum build over the past several weeks,” said T.J. Smith, spokesman for Baltimore police. “We are all in this together, and we’re 1,000 percent supportive of the efforts.”

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia denied without prejudice a request from the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law for a temporary restraining order against the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

The civil rights group claimed the commission Trump created to investigate his claims of voter fraud in last year’s presidential election violated the Federal Advisory Committee Act by failing to put out a public notice or disclose details of conference meeting members held by phone on June 28.

Donald Trump pledged Tuesday morning that the nation will eventually have a working substitute for the teetering Obamacare system, hours after a prohibitive number of Republican senators withdrew from a plan to replace it.

'We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans,' the president tweeted. 'Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked really hard. We will return!'

Trump has said during both his campaign and his presidency that the national medical insurance scheme left in place by the Obama-era Affordable Care Act will eventually topple on its own as costs spiral and insurers pull out of marketplaces.

Via Reddit: Wim Hof first caught the attention of scientists when he proved he was able to stay submerged in ice for one hour and 53 minutes without his core body temperature changing. Since then, he's climbed Mount Everest in his shorts, resisted altitude sickness, completed a marathon in the Namibian Desert with no water and proven – under a laboratory setting – that he's able to influence his autonomic nervous system and immune system at will.

Almost everything Wim has done was previously thought to be impossible, but he's not a freak of nature; he's a master of meditation.

Apple built Siri into its latest update, Sierra, 10.11.5 so I tried it out. Frustrating at first because either Siri is partially deaf or my laptop microphone is not that great or I have a serious speech impediment. Hmm, I think that I'm beginning to understand why it seems so many people don't care to talk to me.

Siri was perfectly useless at first misunderstanding everything. But then I finally got a few wins. I didn't have much to ask anyway. If you care to see it, this how our first session went.

* Wikipedia, Cloud, Cosmics Leaving Outdoor Droplets or CLOUD is an experiment being run at CERN by a group of researchers lead by Jasper Kirkby to investigate the microphysics between galactic cosmic rays (GCRs) and aerosols under controlled conditions.

What is an Animal?

* Wikipedia, Animal WIN!

How do you plant a caladium?

* Good information on planting caladiums. WIN!

Is it a crime to kill someone?

* I don’t know how to respond to that

Can penguins fly?

* Good information on penguins flying WIN!

Where does corn come from?

* Wolfram Alpha Corn North American distribution, a good map WIN!

How many species of snake in the U.S.?

* Good information on snakes in the United States. WIN!

What color are your eyes?

* I don’t have eyes. But if I did, I think I’d be rolling them a lot.

Thank you, Siri, you’ve been very nice.

* I aim to please.

Good night.

* Sorry, I can’t help you with HomeKit here.

What is HomeKit?

* HomeKit lets you use your IOS device (and me) to control things in your home like lights, thermostats and smart plugs.

“It is a form of theological malpractice that borders on heresy when you can p-r-a-y for a president and others when they are p-r-e-y, preying on the most vulnerable,” Barber said. “You’re violating the most sacred principles of religion.”

Barber’s comments set the North Carolina Republican Party ablaze.

In a news release on Sunday, the party said it was “shocked and outraged” over Barber’s “claim that it’s a sin to pray for President Trump.”

Via Reddit: An evolutionary biologist at the University of Houston has published new calculations that indicate no more than 25 percent of the human genome is functional. That is in stark contrast to suggestions by scientists with the ENCODE project that as much as 80 percent of the genome is functional.

In work published online in Genome Biology and Evolution, Dan Graur reports the functional portion of the human genome probably falls between 10 percent and 15 percent, with an upper limit of 25 percent. The rest is so-called junk DNA, or useless but harmless DNA...

The functional portion of the genome is described as that which has a selected-effect function, that is, a function that arose through and is maintained by natural selection. Protein-coding genes, RNA-specifying genes and DNA receptors are examples of selected-effect functions. In his model, only functional portions of the genome can be damaged by deleterious mutations; mutations in nonfunctional portions are neutral since functionless parts can be neither damaged nor improved.

Sunday, July 16, 2017

General Woundwort McCain: You were one of those on the riverbank.
Did Bigwig send you? You know President Trump?

Hazel: I'm a friend of President Trump. And no that is not a wig.
That is his real hair. I have come to tell you that we have to end the endless
wars. Nation building. Overturning governments in places like Iraq and Libya
and now Syria. It has to end now. It is none of our business.

General Woundwort McCain: What was left unfinished will be finished now. We have to
show the world that we are the world’s policeman. That we will overturn the
tyrants in Syria and Russia and North Korea. Everywhere they do not bend to our
superior thoughts and words. We are the ones who will decide. We are the one
world government and everyone from Trump to Putin will bow to our dictate.

Hazel: It would be better for both of us if we could come to
terms with the fact that we cannot control the world. That we have to worry
about our own people. That we have to put the Warren first. Worry about the
rabbits not the world. Let the camels and the men who love them take care of
themselves.

General Woundwort McCain: Terms? You want to come to terms with
our limitations? Very well. These are my
terms. Hand over all the deserters immediately. All of you who dare to stand
against the Global ambitions of the Deep State. Bannon. Miller. Donald Trump
Jr. All of them must be destroyed.

Hazel: We couldn't agree to that. But I can suggest something
better, for both of us--

General Woundwort McCain:[dangerous] You're in no
position to bargain. I control the Senate. I control the media. They love me
and will do my bidding. They will destroy you and Bigwig.

Hazel: We shouldn't be fighting each other. We have enough
enemies as it is. Perhaps we should be together. A joining of free, independent
people who work for the people. The people of America. The people of America
first, last and always.

General Woundwort McCain:[considers this] Ah, I have
no time for this nonsense!

Campion: Shall I kill him, sir?

General Woundwort McCain: No. [to Hazel] You take
back our terms. And you tell your chief, Bigwig, that if he and Bannon and the
others aren't waiting outside when I come for them, I'll tear out every throat
in the place!

Hazel: I am sorry General. I will pass on your demands but I know
that the President will never surrender. He will fight for his people and they
are behind him. All the way. It is war. To the knife.

And sometimes I am sorry when the grassIs growing over the stones in quiet hollowsAnd the cocksfoot leans across the rutted cart-passThat I am not the voice of country fellowsWho now are standing by some headland talkingOf turnips and potatoes or young cornOf turf banks stripped for victory.Here Peace is still hawkingHis coloured combs and scarves and beads of horn.

Upon a headland by a whinny hedgeA hare sits looking down a leaf-lapped furrowThere's an old plough upside-down on a weedy ridgeAnd someone is shouldering home a saddle-harrow.Out of that childhood country what fools climbTo fight with tyrants Love and Life and Time?

The Catholic Church is a boat “on the verge of capsizing,” said Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI in a personal message for the funeral Mass of his close friend, Cardinal Joachim Meisner on Saturday.

Given his inability to travel, the usually silent retired Pope delivered the message in writing, and had it read aloud in the Cologne Cathedral by his personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein, who also serves as Prefect of the Papal Household for Pope Francis.

In the text, Benedict said that Cardinal Meisner “found it difficult to leave his post, especially at a time in which the Church stands in particularly pressing need of convincing shepherds who can resist the dictatorship of the spirit of the age and who live and think the faith with determination.”

What moved me all the more, Benedict said, was that, “in this last period of his life, he learned to let go and to live out of a deep conviction that the Lord does not abandon His Church, even when the boat has taken on so much water as to be on the verge of capsizing.”

There is an underlying current of fear in my activist communities, and it is separate from the daily fear of police brutality, eviction, discrimination, and street harassment. It is the fear of appearing impure. Social death follows when being labeled a “bad” activist or simply “problematic” enough times. I’ve had countless hushed conversations with friends about this anxiety and how it has led us to refrain from participation in activist events, conversations, and spaces because we feel inadequately radical. I actually don’t prefer to call myself an activist, because I don’t fit the traditional mold of the public figure marching in the streets and interrupting business as usual. When I was a Christian, all I could think about was being good, showing goodness, and proving to my parents and my spiritual leaders that I was on the right path to God. All the while, I believed I would never be good enough, so I had to strain for the rest of my life toward an impossible destination of perfection.

I feel compelled to do the same things as an activist a decade later. I self-police what I say in activist spaces. I stopped commenting on social media with questions or pushback on leftist opinions for fear of being called out. I am always ready to apologize for anything I do that a community member deems wrong, oppressive, or inappropriate—no questions asked. The amount of energy I spend demonstrating purity in order to stay in the good graces of a fast-moving activist community is enormous. Activists are some of the judgiest people I’ve ever met, myself included. There’s so much wrongdoing in the world that we work to expose. And yet, grace and forgiveness is hard to come by in the broader community. At times, I have found myself performing activism more than doing activism. I’m exhausted, and I’m not even doing the real work I am committed to do. The quest for political purity is a treacherous distraction for well-intentioned activists.

Joe curries favor with coastal elites. Kid Rock is at home in the middle of the country. And it’s no wonder: He’s travelled the country by bus and minivan on more than 25 tours with legends like Lynyrd Skynyrd and David Allen Coe.

Kid Rock has the long, stringy hair of ’70s rock gods while Scarborough wears a Ken doll bouffant—a requirement for male TV anchors so hackneyed that it has become a stock punchline.

Perhaps most striking is the music. Kid Rock plays straightforward American rock and roll. Scarborough sings Britpop retreads steeped in the sort of hipster self-regard that is unbecoming in a 20-year-old student at a small liberal arts college let alone in a middle-aged man.